^{By Alexandra Villarreal
Sept. 22, 2020}

School is back in session, but students are returning to dramatically different classrooms than the ones they left abruptly in the spring. First graders in masks, calculus over Zoom video calls, indoor recess: a world ravaged by Covid-19 has reimagined what it means to learn. 

In Texas, the new academic year is causing a blitz of emotions, from excitement to boredom to stress. After a nightmarish summer defined by an explosion of coronavirus cases, Texas has suffered more than 14,000 fatalities, with an especially devastating toll on Latino communities. 

Now, students and staff are either walking straight into a petri dish or struggling with  technological difficulties as they learn remotely from home. During the week after Labor Day, NBC News followed five people trying to navigate the changing face of education.

Lisa Gerow, 33, a first grade teacher at Camelot Elementary School in San Antonio, lives with her husband and their dog. Although the academic year started weeks ago,  the day marks her first time with students physically present. She’ll teach five kids in-person and another five remotely as her school slowly phases back into some semblance of normalcy.

Once you become a teacher, you also become a bag lady, Lisa says.

She has four bags, filled with “everything I need for a successful day.” She’s stashed knockoff yellow Converse sneakers — which she painted to resemble pencils — into last year’s Halloween grocery tote, in case her feet need a break from wedges. Meanwhile, her cartoon llama-covered lunchbox holds the crockpot pot roast she made yesterday. 

She double-checks all the essentials, including her computer, mask, snacks and the bottled bubbles and wands she ordered as gifts to celebrate finally being face-to-face with some of her students. 

“I made cheesy little notes to attach to them that say, ‘I’m bubbly with excitement that you’re in my class,’” Lisa says. 

It’s the first day with kids back at school since March. Every year, she tells her students that they’re the best class ever, knowing “what they believe is what they’ll become.” Now, she’s trying to convince herself that today will be the best day ever, even as she seesaws between virtual and in-person first graders amid the pandemic.

The roads are relatively empty this early in the morning, and they sometimes feel emptier during the pandemic with people still working from home. Lisa watches for runners along the dark streets amid a light drizzle. 

On her 20-minute commute to Camelot Elementary School, she pulls on to the highway and goes past an eatery where she sometimes stops when it’s her turn to supply food for “taco club” with her fellow teachers. She also passes the local high school. It’s nice, she says, to see where the kids from her class will study one day.  

“This will definitely be the most people I’ve been around since all of this started,” Lisa says as she prepares her classroom.  

She’s plugged in her school tablets, set up the bubbles and notes, and wiped down desks, a light switch and other high-touch surfaces to avoid infection. 

She realizes that if her husband falls ill from Covid-19, she’ll likely be the carrier, “a level of guilt that’s hard to reconcile.” But right before students arrive, she’s still giddy about seeing them —  both her current first graders, and the ones whose time in her classroom abruptly ended in the  spring. 

“It’s going to be good,” she says. 

Lisa stands in her classroom doorway, waiting for kids to return from their “specials”  — art, music or physical education classes. She’s “just overwhelmed, very overwhelmed, but it’s goin’.” 

With students elsewhere, she hosted a meeting for four other teachers and their instructional coach, when they discussed their plans for next week. She had forgotten to ask her first graders to tidy their space, so she hastily cleared off and wiped down enough desks to give the adults room to sit while remaining physically distant. 

“I am feeling hopeful that the afternoon will be a little bit easier,” she says, as she directs a student to take a seat and pull out his book box. 

As soon as Lisa reaches her classroom after dismissal, she removes her mask and face shield. Then, she starts wiping down desks. 

Her second half of the day has gone smoother than the first. As kids colored and looked at books during indoor recess,  she made a game plan for the afternoon. She took her students outdoors to a breezeway, spaced them roughly 12 feet apart and gave them a five-minute mask break. After that, she had them clean their desks, which they had cluttered with devices, chargers and headphones by lunchtime. 

They studied math, phonics and reading. Then, students who were physically present watched live and virtual kids tuned in over Zoom for science and writing. Somehow, Lisa managed the back-and-forth as she helped students in-person while also answering questions from her remote learners. 

Technology proved her greatest antagonist, but even the parts of her job that turned out to be easiest — including wearing masks — were not completely without incident. After one first grader removed her mask to sneeze, Lisa cleaned her up while explaining that sneezes need to happen behind a face covering, too. 

“They’re little, they don’t really understand how it works,”  she says. 

As Lisa sets out for home, exhausted with a headache, the sky is “very much Texas:” half cloudy, with the sun trying to peek through. 

“There’s a rainbow!” she exclaims. Then, a gasp: “It’s a double rainbow, actually!”  

After the school day ended, she started checking off her mental to-do list. She recorded tomorrow’s lessons, an extra step in case technological issues foil class for her virtual students. 

What she didn’t finish will spill over for later in the week; “it is what it is,” she says. 

When Lisa expected things to be crazy and hectic, they went smoothly. But when she expected them to go smoothly, they were messy. 

As she tied shoelaces, helped with technology or hooked masks onto lanyards so they wouldn’t go missing, she made closer contact with students than she had anticipated. Her dry, cracked hands burn when she uses sanitizer now, after so much hand-washing. 

“It’s just the nature of my job,” she says. “I’m never going to, like, let a kid sit there and cry because their shoes are untied.” 

After a shower, food, medicine and some water, her headache has finally subsided. She’s about to apply a beauty mask, despite how much it tickles, to wash away the wear and tear from all her protective gear. 

“That’s hope for tomorrow,” she says, still thinking about the double rainbow. “It’s gonna be a good day — might be a crazy day — but it’s gonna be a good day.”

Ella Cole, 17, is a senior at Richard King High School in Corpus Christi, where she lives with her mother, brothers and two golden retrievers. But for most of today, her mom won’t be home because she’s traveling to Charleston, North Carolina, for a former college roommate’s wedding in Georgia. 

The school year launched virtually Aug. 13, and while some students just started attending in-person classes, Ella won’t be called back to high school until October. She still practices cross country and swimming, but spends most of the day at home, learning via Zoom.

Ella woke up to her first alarm this morning, as usual. Although she only managed to eat a bite of her chocolate peanut butter protein bar, she made sure her water bottle was full and chilled ahead of cross country practice.

The water bottle, replete with University of Texas Longhorn insignia and other colorful adornments, features a sticker for the times in big block letters: “social distancing 2020.”  

After 43 minutes and 4.8 miles running at a steady pace, Ella feels good. During practice, her bright sneakers stood out from a pack of flying feet as she and her classmates jogged around the residential neighborhood near their high school and on to a main road.

Although the young athletes arrived wearing masks, they ditched them before exercising. They stretched and talked at a distance but eventually braved narrow sidewalks, one next to the other.

If the runners ever bunch too closely together, they pair up, Ella says. Those duets constantly rotate, though, depending on who's having a good day. 

Two eggs over easy with salt and pepper constituted breakfast, and now Ella has made her way to a sitting area and fitness room that doubles as her class setup.

She feels sad about starting the semester online while so many high school traditions fall by the wayside. Seniors at Richard King High School couldn’t watch the sunrise together at the beginning of the year like they normally would; some students held their own celebration, Ella says, but she didn’t go because of the crowds. 

She doubts she’ll get to wear King’s signature senior white and silver “mums,” massive decorative pins popular in Texas during homecoming, despite looking forward to them for years now. Nor has she spent a pep rally in the senior section, a coveted spot separated from everyone else on the opposite side of the gym. 

“We don’t really get to have that anymore,” she says. 

A frustrated Ella explains that her calculus teacher couldn’t write anything down during class because of technological difficulties. 

“She had to just speak the calculus problems, and it just made no sense,” she says.  

Around eight students tuned in today; Ella’s classmates don’t always make it because of bad  Wi-Fi connections or other obstacles. She also misses classes — sometimes one or two a day — if  her internet goes out, a teacher can’t get online or an application crashes. 

She’s been doing virtual calculus for weeks, but none of it really computes yet.

During lunch, Ella connects with kids in her grade over Snapchat, where they tell her that they’re worried about passing a test on Zoom, or that their teacher has been prattling on, muted.

If Ella were at King, she’d be sitting at a table with all her friends, talking face-to-face and walking to class together. Instead, she microwaved leftover spaghetti and meatballs, which she ate in her kitchen. 

“It’s like they took all the fun parts out of school, like socializing with friends, and like those funny conversations with teachers,” she says. Because Zoom courses are recorded for students and head faculty to review, all the instructors act stoic now. 

The pandemic has also robbed Ella and her colleagues of the college admissions assistance their school usually provides as they begin the application process. Counselors didn’t walk her through important timelines at the end of junior year, so she’s having to figure everything out on her own. She hasn’t toured colleges yet, either, and she can’t even submit her SAT scores because she hasn’t had a chance to retake the test since February. 

Seventh period has been canceled because Ella’s teacher doesn’t have a webcam in the yearbook room. 

After listening to lectures in the morning, most of Ella’s afternoon has entailed go-it-alone assignments such as a virtual lab or Spanish worksheet, tasks that sometimes teach the materials well. But other times, vague instructions bog them down, so they’re less effective. 

“I get energized by the fact that the day’s over,” she says candidly.  

Now that she has a window of time, she’s heading to her local athletic club for a swim workout, since she’ll miss practice today to run errands for her mom. Amid the health emergency, swim meets have been canceled for a while now.

Pools have erratically closed, reopened, then closed again as cases surge. All her friends, who graduated last year, missed out on their final season. Now, Ella’s on her own. 

Ella coached herself through warmup, drills and sprints at the pool. “I think it, like, helps my mental sanity, ’cause sometimes it’s just, like, nice to swim alone,” she says. 

She’s still adjusting to her more challenging schedule after an extended hiatus since March, when teachers rarely instructed over Zoom and no longer assigned much homework.

Ella drives home from dinner with her father; inside a crowded restaurant, she feasted on wings, fries and fried pickles. 

Her teachers assigned lighter homework than yesterday, and she’s already finished. “I’m going to bed,” she says. “I’m exhausted.”

Mara Mindell, 40, lives in Austin with her husband, Ryan, their two children — 6-year-old Langston and 20-month-old Opal — her mother, Jacalyn Helms, and two adopted dogs that are mostly pomapoo. Earlier this summer, Mara onboarded remotely for a job with a financial technology company. She and her husband both work from home right now, even as they renovate their house.  

Jacalyn is currently furloughed because she’s immuno-compromised, so she helps Langston with his virtual lessons at Gullett Elementary School from her house, tucked behind the main property. Classes started two days ago.

Mara washes her coffee cup, although she has to make a detour when Opal needs muffins.

The toddler has been making noises since around 6 a.m. Mara suspects that Langston found his way to the Xbox after getting up before the rest of the family, and that his baby sister was miffed by all the light.

“Sometimes, she’ll go back to sleep, so I was hoping she would,” Mara says. “But, she didn’t.”

Langston is enjoying a two-course breakfast: muffins — “we try to be healthy with the blueberry,” Mara half-jokes — followed by Lucky Charms cereal. Ryan is still sleeping, but she’ll wake him in 15 to 20 minutes so she and Langston can get showered and dressed.  

Their new morning routine has already suffered some major setbacks. “I don’t think it’s early enough,” Mara concedes.

The morning schedule has finally redeemed itself. Langston made it to class by his 8:15 a.m. start time, and he and Mara even walked the dogs together before he went to his grandmother’s house for school. 

“I don’t know what it will look like tomorrow, but today it worked, so one day at a time,” Mara says.  

On the floor of the children’s room, she’s invented a makeshift office out of a reclining chair and a portable laptop desk. Eventually, she realizes her chair may actually be upside down. “I can’t even tell what I’m sitting on,” she says.  

“Our schedule is all messed up now,” Mara says.  

Ryan has a call, so she’s in charge of Opal and can’t make lunch yet. Langston is there, too, though she doesn’t know why. Sometimes, he just decides it’s a good time to play basketball in his room. 

She thinks his “small group” is about to start, the most important part of his academic week. “Come on, come on, come on, hustle, hustle!” she shouts as he heads back to school with Jacalyn.   

Opal keeps closing Mara’s laptop and messing with cords, making it impossible to work on the computer. “I just feel frustrated,” she says. “I just started this job, so it’s especially hard. But I just feel like I’m capable of so much more. And I just can’t — I cannot do it.” 

Despite commotion caused by lawnmowers and construction work, it was a really good nap time. Opal slept a full two hours, and now, Ryan is taking care of her.

“I’m working,” Mara giggles with excitement. 

It may just be the second cup of coffee talking, but “I do feel a lot better,” she says. 

Langston got out early from school, so the kids are watching “StoryBots”on Netflix while Mara takes a break from work to get up and move around. “I forgot that it’s nice to not have Opal in there for meetings, ’cause I can actually concentrate and hear what’s going on,” she says. 

She toys with the idea of a 15-minute nap but opts instead for a walk with the dogs. They’ll just go around the block; otherwise, Langston complains that his feet hurt. 

“I also unloaded and loaded the dishwasher,” she suddenly remembers. “I don’t know when I did that, or how I found time.” 

Office hours are technically over, though Mara will keep working later tonight. 

“Everything runs together. The work day, the everything,” she says. 

She appreciated the chill in the air during her afternoon walk; it woke her up. Langston didn’t even complain about his feet, and Opal and Jacalyn tagged along, too. 

Now, back in the kitchen, she makes the kids dinner: an omelette stuffed with turkey sausage crumbles and Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese. She’s also in for a treat; Ryan just ventured out to bring home hot chicken sandwiches with jalapeño mac-and-cheese and fries.

“I was trying to eat something healthy today, but it’s not happening,” Mara says. “When I get stressed, I like to eat, so...” 

Dinner was delicious, but it’s time to get back to work. “Part of me is still in that old mind of thinking that, like, after hours is kind of after hours and just extra,” she says. “Even though it’s not.”

Opal will go to sleep at 7 p.m., followed closely by Langston. Then, Mara will finally get to indulge in an episode of “Dr. Who” before bed. 

“I feel like in some ways,” she says, “my day is just beginning.”

Katelyn Hamilton, 25, is certified in English as a second language and teaches third grade at Bell’s Hill Elementary School, where 93 percent of the student body is Hispanic. She lives in Waco with her boyfriend and their dog, a pit-lab mix. School started Tuesday; she has 13 kids in-person and nine remote for now. 

Coach Bobby Estes, 55, serves as the athletic coordinator and head football coach at North Dallas High School. He lives in a Dallas suburb with his wife and the long-haired spaniel they inherited from one of his sons, who’s off at college. Although school is still virtual and football games don’t start until next month, athletes returned to practice Tuesday.

“I have a work-life balance problem,” Katelyn admits. Yesterday, she prepped her coursework until 10:30 p.m. 

“I could probably work all the way up until I go to school, and I still probably wouldn’t feel prepared,” she says. 

Her job requires double the effort now as she teaches in-person and virtually, and technological malfunctions just complicate matters. On Thursday, Zoom had glitches because so many people joined the network all at once. The internet slowed, her video lagged and she couldn’t see her students. 

“I never feel prepared to work with 8- and 9-year-olds, because they are unpredictable by nature,” she says. “Now, with, you know, everything going on, it’s even worse.” 

When Bobby pops back into the house, his wife immediately assumes he must have forgotten either his watch or his phone. 

“She knows me well,” he jokes, after grabbing his watch this time around.  

He’s already finished his early-morning row, and on the drive to North Dallas High School, he makes a pit stop at McDonald’s to order oatmeal for himself and sausage biscuits for his quarterback.

“It’s worth a dollar or two to make sure that he, you know, has a little bit of something in his stomach before practice,”  Bobby says.  

The pandemic has been “eye-opening,” as resources he once took for granted disappear. “Social-distancing, masks, all those things are extremely important to keep coaches and kids healthy,” he says, but virtual learning has ramifications, too. 

Even if the district does pass out free meals, daily breakfasts and lunches can’t happen in the same way without students in the building. Bus transportation doesn’t run at the right times anymore, even though many of the teens still rely on it. One of his athletes walks two miles each way just to get to practice.

“He’s got a pretty good hike,” Bobby says. But “he’s a captain and a leader, and he’s there every time we open the doors.” 

Bobby just got to school, and some of his athletes beat him there.

It’s been raining lately, so today at practice the players will substitute a soggy field for nearby concrete while they go through their conditioning stations. Tuesday was their first day back since July, but they’re already making strides. 

The team is staring down a tough first game in October, when they’ll go up against the Alvarado Indians, who will have already been playing for weeks. 

“We’re gonna be dusting the cobwebs off, kinda getting used to each other,” Bobby says, while “they’ve already worked out all the kinks.” 

Katelyn sits at her desk, preparing for math at the start of the day. “Hopefully, Zoom will work this morning,” she says.  

She’s also double-checking to see if any of her online students submitted work after hours.

In a few minutes, her earliest third graders will start to arrive at Bell's Hill Elementary School,  have their temperatures taken and make their way to her classroom. They’ll wear masks, but no other protective gear. Same with her. Although some of her colleagues in another department were issued face shields, she wasn’t, and she hasn’t bought one yet.

Two coaches at North Dallas High School pull together the “cloth,” T-shirts and shorts destined for each athlete’s locker. 

“Monday, when they put that helmet on, football’s officially started,” Bobby says. “Football is real when a helmet goes on your head.”

Their first practices this season have focused instead on strength and conditioning. Today, players went through a circuit of six stations, then worked on their defense for 45 minutes. When they did route redirections, one kid asked, perplexed: were they allowed to touch each other? 

The players don’t wear masks to exercise, and won’t when they go up against other teams, either. “It’s just part of the game, and we are taking risks to play this game,” Bobby says. “We’re really trying to hope that we don’t have to live in fear, I guess.”

The morning has gone well, though it’s been “a little bit bumpy,” Katelyn says.  

Students didn’t learn much new material once school shut down in March, so the children aren’t yet ready for third-grade math. “We’re workin’, we’re gonna get there. I have no doubt about it,” she says.  

Her class is also experiencing some behavioral issues after such a long break. Some of her remote students didn’t even have access to the internet until the school district delivered  hot spots to them yesterday. Today, attendance looks good — all but one virtual student signed on this morning, and a lone in-person kid has been marked absent. 

“Now, I think we’re kinda getting more into the groove of things, so hopefully that should be, like, most of the hiccups,” Katelyn says.  

Katelyn sits in the library, where teachers chitchat, one per table, as they eat their lunch. She ordered her weekly Jimmy John’s sandwich, a time-honored tradition. “It’s just a small little thing to look forward to,” she says. “But it just makes Fridays even better.” 

After she picked up the kids from art class, they wiped down their tables ahead of lunch and delved deeper into “The One and Only Ivan.” She videotaped herself for her virtual learners as she read, and in-person students could choose whether to direct their attention to her desk or watch on the projector. 

Katelyn has also started recording some of her lessons for class, so her in-person students can get used to the format in case school gets shut down again.  

Bobby has moved into his cubby office, which was probably a storage room in another life, he says. “Fancy offices, you tend not to work in ’em, because you don’t want to mess them up,” he says. “Just a place to put a computer, that’s all I need.”

The coaches got lunch to go and ate as a staff in their office. It was Bobby’s first hamburger since mid-June; he’s been on a health kick while some of his players gain the so-called “Covid 15.” 

“One kid said, ‘Coach, I gotta lose weight before we get back to school, ’cause my pants don’t fit,’” Bobby says. 

The team’s summer strength and conditioning workouts were cut short by Dallas County, after physical fitness had already fallen by the wayside for most of the spring. Those lost months mean that “our kids aren’t as strong as they would have been,” Bobby says.   

Woodrow Wilson High School sits beneath a flight pattern for Dallas’ in-town airport, Love Field, and when Bobby worked there, a Southwest Airlines jet zoomed by every five minutes or so. But for almost 10 days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the skies  had gone eerily quiet, with no commercial planes in sight. 

Bobby remembers the moment when a Southwest jet finally flew over the school again. “Kids stopped for about a half-second and started clapping,” he says. “It brought back a sense of normalcy.”

Texas high school football has only ever stopped for three reasons: Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and now Covid-19. “We’re way in uncharted territory,” Bobby says.  

Something great happened earlier today, Katelyn says: one of her students had his nose sticking out of his mask, but then another kid quietly got his attention and corrected him. 

After lunch, her class continued their studies, with a little bit of partying thrown in to reward reading and writing in their journals. Katelyn also commemorated the  19th anniversary of 9/11, with a read-aloud of  “Fireboat,” a children’s book about the retired John J. Harvey fireboat that returned to service amid the tragedy, and photos of the twin towers and the Pentagon. 

A wasp nest sabotaged recess after one child got stung, so the kids instead played on their iPads. Dismissal went smoothly at the end of the day, and now, she and a friend are about to start planning the weeks to come. 

“It’s guy night,” Bobby says, or at least that’s what his wife calls it. 

He and his staff are on a scouting trip to watch the Alvarado team, whom they’ll play against during their first game in October. “It’s just exciting to get back doing football stuff,” he says.  

The locker room finally looks how it should again, with clothes and helmets in place. “For an old ball coach,” he says, “that’s what you’re looking for. You’re looking for familiarity, ... the feelings that you’re actually gonna make a difference.

“That’s what you’ve done your entire life.”

After grabbing dinner at a chain restaurant with her boyfriend and their friend, Katelyn says she’ll watch “Married at First Sight” or “Selling Sunset” at home while organizing morning activities for the week. 

Today, three different students asked her if they will have to take the STAAR test, Texas’ standardized assessment that’s administered in the spring. “They’re already nervous about it, and I mean, it’s the first week of school,” Katelyn says.   

She tells them just to do their best, but her students do have gaps in their knowledge after missing a significant chunk of second grade. She also realizes a closure could come at any time with the pandemic. 

“It’s hard to celebrate,” she says, “’cause I know that there’s just so much more to come.” 

After Bobby arrives home from Alvarado, he says he’s going to set down his gym bag, take a shower and get some shut-eye before practice tomorrow. Helmets and shoulder pads get thrown into the mix next week. “Everybody’s a hero in shorts,” Bobby jokes.

His tool may be football, but he tries to use it to teach discipline and nurture his players into a brotherhood, lessons “that last a lifetime.”

“Winning helps. Winning’s fun. But it’s not always about the winning,” he says. “It’s about just teaching young men — whether they’re Black, white or brown — to work as a team and to care for one another.”